by Grand, David
It’s all right, said Estella, say her name. Say it, she said as she clenched her thighs tightly against his hips, tightened her grip on his penis, bore her ass down between his thighs. Isabella, said Bloom quietly and clumsily. Louder, said Estella. Clearer. Isabella, said Bloom, louder this time. Again, Estella exhaled. And again, Bloom said Isabella’s name, this time with less pause and inhibition, with more feeling, and he could see her face, as clear in his mind as he could see Estella. Isabella, he said, Isabella. Over and over he said her name, and with each mention of it, Estella said, panting now, Yes, good, good, yes. And after several more mentions of Bloom’s lost love, a final Yes! arrived most suddenly, and Bloom felt something indescribable. He felt Estella’s body temperature rise, her skin hot to the touch; he felt her entire musculature expand and contract around him. He felt her tremble and tremble and tremble. She dug her fingers into his chest and she trembled some more, and then she said, Ready? and with only the slightest movement of her hips, she pressed her stomach against Bloom’s, and the moment she did this Bloom was compelled to lower his hand from her breast and grab hold of her scar, which he squeezed with all his might, and now trembling himself, his eyes feeling as if they were about to combust into flames, he began to fill her, and as he did so, he could feel himself crying, in small jags, like a small child in the aftermath of a tantrum.
There now, said Estella as she lowered her weight onto his chest. There, there, that’s good. She didn’t move. The birds stilled in their cages. She continued to hold him inside her, squeezing every last drop from him. And with her warm breath on his ear, she lulled him back to sleep, still whispering, There now, there, there, that’s what you needed.
And it was true. It was what Bloom needed. More than he knew.
In the morning, when the birds first began to stir and make noise, Eduardo gently shook Bloom awake and said it was time to go. When he had dressed, Bloom asked him if he should wake Estella to say goodbye. He said she wasn’t in the house. She had left him in the middle of the night and had gone to his boat in the cove. She was now there, asleep. She says, said Eduardo, you may return should you feel the need to see her again.
* * *
And he would. Each time Bloom felt the memory of Isabella begin to fade from his mind, he returned to Estella. Each time he felt himself consumed by bitterness and self-pity, he drove to the port and rode with Eduardo on the last ferry of the day to Santa Ynez, and each time he visited Estella, he was able to bear his fate. They would quietly dine and watch the ocean crash against the rocks. She would play music for him as he drank his whiskey, and she would make her exit to visit Guillaume’s grave. As she had done before, she would visit Bloom in the middle of the night, and he would shut his eyes and see Isabella. In time, Bloom found himself wanting to take an earlier and earlier ferry, and wanted to stay on Santa Ynez longer than the one night, for days, sometimes weeks. The island was calm and peaceful, unpopulated, and he discovered how clear his mind became when he was there. It reminded him of Mount Terminus before the arrival of his brother. It reminded him of his childhood in Woodhaven. He and Estella took long, quiet walks together, and as they grew more accustomed to each other, she told him stories of the ceaseless days traveling with the circus, on land, on sea, through the biggest and oldest of cities, into the middle of nowhere, to the smallest of prairie towns and villages, always on the move, wandering farther and farther from home. Eduardo, too, told him stories of his endless sea adventures. He had lost count of the number of times he had circumnavigated the Earth. More times than any one man should, he said. Eduardo taught Bloom how to fish off a boat. He taught him how to spear fish in the shallows. They paddled on swells into sea caves and sat under their natural cupolas at low tide, eating lunches Estella had prepared for them. They fed the seals and watched the dolphins play. They caught pigs escaped from the few ranches on the far side of the island and returned them home to be slaughtered, and they took a share of the meat home to be cured. And one night Estella took Bloom by the hand after dinner and led him to her room, to the large bed she had shared with Guillaume, and they enjoyed each other without mentioning the dead, and they held each other close through the night and into the morning, and Estella that day emptied a room whose window looked off to the sea, and Bloom looked off to the sea, and he could see in its empty expanse The Death of Paradise.
He could see his work taking shape in his mind, and sometimes for weeks at a time, he would spend the better part of his days in this room doing no other work than thinking through the picture in his mind, and Estella never bothered him, and Eduardo never bothered him. They left him to himself. To the quiet. To the pleasures of his prolonged silences. To his most natural state of being. They all shared this in common. He loved it here, and there were times Bloom thought of never leaving. And perhaps he would have had Estella asked him to stay. He might have left Mount Terminus behind had she made the subtlest of gestures, but she didn’t, so he didn’t. He came and went as he pleased. Each time he returned he was warmly welcomed and embraced. Each time he left, they bid him goodbye with a warm farewell.
PART V
PARADISE
When the Mount Terminus subdivision opened, fighter pilots recently returned from the war flew planes in formation across the basin and performed feats of aerial acrobatics. Simon, in the company of councilmen, the governor, and members of the water authority, stood before a fountain at the edge of the bluff, and there Bloom’s brother proclaimed this the beginning of a new era, at which point water sprang forth from the fountain’s spigots and arced high overhead. That evening, while in the same company, Simon lifted a switch on a transformer box, and with it, all the land for as far as all could see illuminated. Street after street, incandescent light shone atop poles, out windows, onto billboards advertising soap and beauty products and Mount Terminus pictures. Rockets shrieked from the earth and exploded into sparkling bouquets over clay tiles topping the roofs, reflected from the boulevard’s office building windows, onto the eyes of pilgrims who had driven in to take in the spectacle. There seemed to be a ceaseless supply of incendiaries. The sky burst open over the development into the early hours of the next morning; over the stages and warehouses of the new studio the pyrotechnics continued to brighten the sky until the sun broke the day. When the light show had ceased, Bloom drove with Simon to the new lot, and there, before he opened it to the employees and the public, Simon walked Bloom through streets and town squares, past far-flung places Bloom would likely never visit, and he was amazed by what he saw, and he was amazed at what his brother had accomplished. It was all too big for words. It was as if Simon truly were some modern pharaoh or emperor, some ancient warlord philosopher king. He had built here a small city within the city, and with the size and scope of his endeavor a testament to his power and vision, he easily attracted talent from the East, new directors, actors, writers, photographers, technicians, so many, in fact, Simon said he would need to appoint an army of stage managers to commandeer the new personnel. No longer would he be seen on his porch conducting the action of the studio. No longer, Bloom presumed, would he be seen at all. It was one thing to know the enormity of a man’s ambition, another altogether to witness that ambition realized. Simon’s achievement radiated out over the wires, and as news of opportunity at the studio, on the land here and in the valley, spread in the weeks that followed, more and more pilgrims arrived. Cars streamed in from downtown, from the desert, from remote places in the mountains, the outer reaches of the valleys. People en masse massed in the streets. Everywhere. Simply to see. To be part of history. To behold Simon’s achievement. Even the malcontents from Pacheta Lake were present, but perhaps because the festivities were so popular and lively, they didn’t dare disrupt them. They did, however, make their attendance known. Dozens of them formed a quiet protest on the periphery of the fountain, at the gates of the studio, and with the grimmest of faces, they silently held up signs of protest—Ignore Us At Your Peril; We Will Be Heard; Just When Y
ou Least Expect It, You’ll Know Who We Are—and were bullied away by the police into paddy wagons. When the energy of all was finally spent and the stretch of land had quieted, moving trucks rolled in, and the men and women who had purchased their new homes from Simon’s real estate company settled, and soon Bloom saw take life the map his brother had kept in his mother’s shrine. The entire basin, it appeared to Bloom, grew more and more green and colorful by the day, and it continued to phosphoresce at night, a shade of violet, or was it lavender, and the stars, he could have sworn, had begun to dim. On nights that held a chill in the air, a scrim of smoke blanketed the pale blue light, and if the current of wind swept in from the ocean, it could lift the sweet smell of burning wood as high as Mount Terminus’s peak. They were there. Always there. Their cars roaming the streets. Their trams crating them back and forth to and from the heart of the city. An occasional siren crying a sorrowful wail.
* * *
As much as Bloom admired his brother’s achievement, he took comfort knowing a boundary was drawn around his ambition at the base of Mount Terminus. And while he felt a dull ache when the members of the colony departed the plateau for homes on the grid, he mostly felt relief to see them go, including Simon, who had built a sizable home on a fine piece of property that elevated him just high enough to appreciate the entire stretch of land he had developed. The plateau from hereon would remain largely unused. Except on the rare occasion—when the stages and studios of Mount Terminus Productions were overbooked—it was Bloom’s to do with as he pleased. It afforded him the time and silence to continue working at an unhurried pace on The Death of Paradise. It provided him the right set of circumstances to meticulously re-create under the warehouse skylights the rooms of the villa as he imagined they had been when Fernando and Miranda, Manuel and Adora occupied them. Every now and again, he called on the aid of Hershel Verbinsky and Hannah Edelstein. He mailed them designs for furniture and art, odds and ends, and, on occasion, asked for a helping hand. Usually, however, he relied on Roya to keep him company, sometimes Gus, who helped with heavy lifting, and every now and again, Gottlieb, when his mood and schedule allowed it. Simon had offered the plateau to Bloom and his mentor, to make it their own personal domain, but Gottlieb was fonder of people than Bloom had realized. He couldn’t properly be himself if he wasn’t being a nuisance. To feel relevant, he told Bloom, he needed to be in the company of people who properly loathed him. If he wasn’t agitating his colleagues, he didn’t consider himself fully alive. Bloom, who possessed his own idiosyncratic methods, albeit antithetical to Gottlieb’s, understood. He often wished he were equipped to contend with Simon and Gottlieb’s boisterous world, but if his time on Santa Ynez had taught him anything, he knew he was better disposed to living his life apart, as his father had done, as his mother had done. Upon his returns from Santa Ynez, he often envisioned raising the walls of the estate higher and higher, so high his view from the top of the tower would become obstructed. He dreamed at times of encircling the gardens and the grove behind such a wall, and cutting himself off completely, forever, with little more than a slot through which he could receive the most essential things. He would have been perfectly fulfilled living such a life with Roya, Meralda, and Gus. And when these figments passed, he thought, perhaps after he had completed The Death of Paradise, he would make it so. Cut himself off. For good.
And why not?… What, after all, did he have to offer anyone? Like Death, like Jacob, like the earliest inhabitants of Mount Terminus, his fate, it seemed, was sealed. God had sealed him into the Book of Life with the mark of misery and sorrow. What good was it to fight against it any longer?
* * *
Bloom spent some months trying to work out the details of the Mount Terminus massacre, and for months he felt his attempts a failure. He wanted more than anything else to portray Don Fernando as the monster he was, but he worried that if he provided him the camera’s point of view, he could very easily turn him into a conquering hero. He attempted, therefore, to frame the atrocity from Manuel’s innocent and observant point of view, as his perspective seemed more compatible with the truth Bloom wanted to show. But knowing what he knew of Manuel Salazar now, of his craven self-interest, of his cowardly disregard for the woman he claimed to love, he didn’t wish for the audience to mistake his sensitivity as an artist as a form of romantic nobility. He began to recall the conversations he had with Dr. Straight on the subject of nationalism and tribalism, of defining the enemy as something other than human, and it eventually occurred to Bloom, this scene’s success—if he was to get to its essential truth—was dependent on a shifting perspective. If his intent was to charge Fernando as a monster, Manuel as an unwitting accomplice, he must humanize the people whose lives they and the church destroyed, and so he went back in time to the images he drew for Jacob in their early days on Mount Terminus, the ones in which he included his mother as a participant in the mountain’s idyllic past, and he decided to make the conquered, not the conquerors, the centerpiece of this movement. As soon as Fernando disgraced himself in Spain, was ordered into exile by the king, put aboard the ship bound for the New World, he would cut away to the spring on Mount Terminus, and dwell there with the children hanging from the limbs of the oak trees, with the men spearfishing in the sea, with the women tending to the fires and preparing for the feasts and the celebrations. Here he would allow the light to shine, here he would make these people as real as Eduardo and Estella were real, and he would show his audience who the true barbarians were, and what darkness they carried in their hearts.
When this idea took hold, Bloom began drawing throughout the days and late into the nights. He relived his earliest days on Mount Terminus and re-created the world he had imagined as a child, the images he had captured in his waking dreams. And on one such night when he attempted to retrieve from his memory an image of his mother, to see her living within the long-lost Arcadia, he paused for a moment and looked out his studio window, into the courtyard, where he saw a dark figure returning his gaze. It stood still for a moment and then walked off in the direction of the cottages. He thought perhaps it was Roya, but Roya, he recalled, had long since turned in for the night. Perhaps he saw nothing at all? He shut off the light so he could better see into the dim light of the courtyard, and now he observed the same dark figure walk under the toupee of bougainvillea atop the pergola. Bloom hurried out the studio door, down the steps into the courtyard, and he followed the figure into the grove, where he glimpsed a slim wisp of a woman’s silhouette enter the rose garden. He called out a hello, but there was no sign of her. He continued on to the garden’s center, through the passages cutting across the concentric circles, and when he reached the glowing limbs of the enraptured couple sleeping the Sleep of Death, there, sitting on the bench set opposite Jacob’s grave, in the glow of moonlight reflecting off the statuary marble, was Isabella, the sight of whom caused Bloom’s body to behave in an involuntary manner, one not conducive to sustaining consciousness. His extremities started to tingle, as did the very follicles attaching his hair to his scalp. The scent of the air sweetened, and then the moon’s silvery glow grayed and eventually filled with an inky darkness.
* * *
When Bloom started to come to, he felt his head resting in the warmth of a lap and a hand stroking his cheek. Again his thoughts turned to Roya, but when he opened his eyes, he found what was unmistakably Isabella’s face in the darkness, and he thought of his mother searching the windows for an image of Leah, and he thought of the images he saw of her being chased by the phantasm of her dead sister. He reached for the hand running down his cheek and felt its form, its fingers, its bones, and he said to himself, I’ve gone mad.
No, Joseph, you haven’t gone mad.
But you’re dead.
No, I’m here, said Isabella, here with you.
She sounded weak, like an imprint of a life, as if something inside the very core of her had been torn apart. She reached for Bloom’s hand and raised it to her mouth, and s
he blew her breath onto it. She then pulled his palm to her breast so Bloom could feel the faint beat of her heart.
See?
It’s not possible, thought Bloom. He lifted himself up and turned to her.
But your letter …
What letter?
The one you carried with you. The one sealed with the drawings I sent before you departed.
But that letter was lost.
No, said Bloom. No, it wasn’t.
No?
No. For almost two years I’ve been mourning your death.
Two years?
Yes, said Bloom. Two awful years.
